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Wednesday, January 28, 2015

All the trimmings

The easy part of covering a wall with fake leather fabric is covering the wall;

the hard part is making and adding the trim.

As I was comfortably crawling around the floor in my hand-me-down knee pads,
cutting the 1" wide lengths of material that would be turned into trim, I had plenty of time to ponder
how I could make the process easier. I had vague but awful memories from nine years ago of standing
in the garage for hours on end, gluing and folding and pressing and trying to find enough paint cans
to hold down the finished strips until the glue dried. Surely there had to be a better way.

Whisper: Build a contraption.

Me: What kind of contraption?

Whisper: How should I know? I've never made fake-leather trim. You figure it out.

If there's one thing I learned from Dad, it's the art of improvisation.

I clamped two boards together, using a couple strands of twisted baling wire to separate them.

I sprayed each strip of trim with adhesive, folded the sides in toward the middle,

then fed it through the boards and out the other side.

Once I finished gluing and folding and feeding, I turned the strip over and

yanked it back and forth against the boards as if I were polishing a shoe.

Presto! It was still a tedious process but it took much less time than my first go-round.

So there you have it, 82.75 feet of trim, waiting to be nailed onto the walls.

Got any plans for Saturday?

Last time, I eye-balled the spacing of the nails, which worked ok, minus the black-and-blue thumbs.

This time, I've discovered the wonder of a nailhead spacer. What will they think of next?

25 years in the fabric business. BFA in Weaving. I have NEVER seen a nail spacer. What WILL they think of next? I like your trim jig. Very good spacers! The technical term for what you did after the initial glue up is burnishing. You set the crease with heat (friction) and pressure as well as activating the glue fully. Incredibly awesome. Incredibly!

I do the same thing when I make bias tape out of cotton fabric with an iron. In your situation, I'm not sure I would have made the leap to the same process with pleather...smart! Can't wait to see the finished product. In my house, unfortunately, those walls would be prime claw sharpening locations for my feline critters. I know that because i foolishly installed embossed wallpaper under the bar and it quickly became fun time for them!